


Mnemosyne

by calime



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:41:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28025667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calime/pseuds/calime
Summary: A musing on memories.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 17
Collections: Highlander Holiday ShortCuts 2020





	Mnemosyne

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morgyn Leri (morgynleri)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/gifts).



> Thank you to the usual suspects a.k.a. Adam (Kurikoer on AO3) and Cat for beta and support!

Methos had a complicated relationship with memories.

One might think the sheer amount of memories accumulated over hundreds of lifetimes would be the most burdensome aspect, the sheer weight of them dragging him down, paralyzing in innumerable ways. Even an immortal, ever-renewing brain must be unable to bear the need of making new connections while storing and retrieving and accessing the older pathways. Maybe the psychological stress of realizing how many memories one is inevitably losing, and not being able to let them go.

But no, that had never been a problem for him – the memories belonged to his hundreds of lives, making up a chain where all the links were connected, but not exactly the same; it was the same chain, yet every link was subtly different, and connecting the whole. Memories were a part of him, yet he did not want to be their slave. 

Memories were like horses, in a way. They were high-maintenance and temperamental, and some of them were vicious, or half-wild, or had faults and vices; they might kick your skull in if you were unlucky or crush your foot if you weren’t careful, or they might fail you on a trek through a wilderness or on a run. But they were also dependable, sturdy, warm, breathtakingly beautiful, offering strength, sustenance and speed. You just had to respect them, care for them, and most importantly, know how to handle them, when to rely on them and to what extent.

And Methos had spent too many of his hundreds of lifetimes considering a man lucky if he owned a horse, and blessed beyond measure if he owned countless ones, to think of his multitudes of memories as anything but a treasure, even if some pieces contained within might have been troublesome.

Memories you could manage, tame, make use of, even those that were sharp-edged, prone to induce injury and despair. You could anchor them within a life lived and come back to them from a safe distance of time with the soothing filter of someone not-quite-else yet not the same. You could retell them and shape them as every story keeps being reborn again, a little different in each retelling. You could set them down in scripts in a journal, in shapes in wood or stone or glass, in swirling patterns of cloth; in shifting sounds of music or chant, and define and bind them to do your bidding that way, to be retrieved and used for your pleasure or need. With the ones that resisted at first, well, you had skills and an abundance of time. And the ones that were lost – who should be grieving a wild horse lost on the steppe when you have a shiny herd to take care of at home? 

Dreams, on the other hand – there was no ambivalence about them. Dreams were not to be trusted; visions were something that led to madness. He had much more than a handful of memories to make him wary of meddling with such – and of anyone who did. Dreams and visions and prophecies had a tendency to turn into a trap, or a wildfire, destroying everything that could not get away.

Time drifted on, more lives-links were added to the chain that was Methos – or maybe always led to who Methos was at any present point of time? – with memories forged into each link. Horses admittedly lost some of their status and usefulness, but the universe opened up towards the stars and there were new lives to be lived, with new memories to come. His many horses had borne many names, all given with consideration to fit them; so when he purchased his first spaceship (a nice, sturdy, slightly used interstellar yacht of a good make; another kind of horse to learn how to handle and to carry him forward), he’d named it Mnemosyne.


End file.
